One of my favorite locations to photograph is along Templin Road in northern Chester County. The area is adjacent to the Thomas P. Bentley Nature Preserve and Warwick Furnace and sits in the valley of the French Creek, South Branch.
This pond has been a favorite subject in the past. Here is a sunset shot from quite a few years ago.
… and a swan from years gone by.
The Warwick Furnace Farms is a historic district that is located in northern Chester County that includes the ruins of an early iron furnace that was owned by Anna Rutter Nutt, widow of Samuel Nutt. The iron furnace was previously featured here. I wanted to return to visit the farm and was able to do so when I had the day off for Good Friday.
Anna Rutter Nutt was the daughter of Thomas Rutter, who erected the first ironwork in Pennsylvania at Pine Forge Mansion and Industrial Site. Samuel Nutt bought the original tracts of land for the Coventry area with partners William Branson and Mordecai Lincoln, the great-great grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. The 786-acre historic district was listed by the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The related village of Coventryville can be seen here.
In 2015, the French & Pickering Creeks Conservation Trust permanently protected the 553-acre Warwick Furnace Farm through conservation easements and the acquisition of 108 acres, which will be the future home of a public preserve.
The ironmaster’s house and workers’ houses, the historic farmhouse and the barns in this historic district are currently used in the operation of a working farm, which produces lavender and lavender products. The farm has a shop and which sells the wonderful local lavender products. Check the web site for information, hours, special events and to purchase online.
Yellow Springs Village is a historic village in West Pikeland Township in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The community includes historic churches, established in the 1770s by German Reformed and Lutheran members. It has been a location for a boys’ school, the country school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fiine Arts, a restaurant, an inn and many other uses. Today it is a haven for artists and hosts special events.
The village was busy the day I visited, so I concentrated on the peripheral areas. The early Spring color was still in evidence. You can learn more here.
I will be taking a break this week to celebrate the holiday and regroup from a colder than average winter that largely kept me cooped up inside.
In the meantime, enjoy some shots from Springtimes past.
Although the weather has continued to be worse than normal, I was able to get out in March and image the night sky objects for the Hubble Anniversary Challenge for the month. More about the challenge can be found here.
This month’s objects contained a few star clusters. The first of which is Messier 67, a lovely open cluster in Cancer. It is also known as M67 or NGC 2682 and is sometimes called the King Cobra Cluster or the Golden Eye Cluster. It was discovered by Johann Gottfried Koehler in 1779. Estimates of its age range between 3.2 and 5 billion years. Distance estimates are likewise varied, but typically are 800–900 parsecs . It is well populated, almost appearing like a globular cluster, and is a paradigm study object in stellar evolution. I find it to be the most interesting looking object of this group.
Next up is the well-known Beehive Cluster, also an open cluster in Cancer. It is known as Praesepe (Latin for “manger”, “cot” or “crib”), M44, NGC 2632, or Cr 189. One of the nearest open clusters to Earth, it contains a larger population of stars than other nearby bright open clusters, holding around 1,000 stars. Under dark skies, the Beehive Cluster looks like a small nebulous object to the naked eye, and has been known since ancient times. Classical astronomer Ptolemy described it as a “nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer”. It was among the first objects that Galileo studied with his telescope. The distance to M44 is often cited to be between 160 and 187 parsecs (520–610 light years).
Age and proper motion coincide with those of the Hyades, suggesting they may share similar origins. Both clusters also contain red giants and white dwarfs, which represent later stages of stellar evolution, along with many main sequence stars.
Continuing the theme of open clusters, we continue to Messier 48, also known as NGC 2548. It is in the equatorial constellation of Hydra. It sits near Hydra’s westernmost limit with Monoceros, to the east and slightly south of Hydra’s brightest star, Alphard. This grouping was discovered by Charles Messier in 1771, but there is no cluster precisely where Messier indicated; he made an error, as he did with M47. Credit for discovery is sometimes given instead to Caroline Herschel in 1783.
M48 is visible to the naked eye under good atmospheric conditions. The cluster is located some 2,500 light-years from the Sun. The age estimated from isochrones is 400±100 million years, while gyrochronology age estimate is 450±50 million yearsr – in good agreement.
Finally, we come to Caldwell 48, also known as NGC 2775,. It is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer. It is 67 million light-years away from the Milky Way. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1783. C48 belongs to the Antlia-Hydra Cluster of galaxies and is the most prominent member of the NGC 2775 Group, a small galaxy group in the Virgo Super-cluster, along with the Local Group. Other members of the NGC 2775 Group include NGC 2777 and UGC 4781. This object reminds us that Spring is known as “galaxy season” due to the prevalence of these distant objects in the night sky.
Due to the distance, this objects appears small in Seestar S50. It is the fuzzy object in the center of the photo.
I took advantage of some nearly 80 degree weather to go to the Brandywine Museum of Art before my annual pass ran out. While I was having some mushroom soup in the cafe, I noticed a few fisherman in Brandywine Creek. I’m not sure what they were fishing for in March, maybe panfish.
I made a few stops on the way home to get some RAW files to test new photo editing software that I am using (goodbye Adobe). These shots, as well as the forsythia from last week, are the result.
First a some exterior shots of the Goshenville historic site on Route 352.
The next stop was the Thornbury CSA even though it is a bit early for local produce.
The town of Forksville is not far from World’s End State Park. It features the Forksville Covered Bridge, a Burr arch truss covered bridge over Loyalsock Creek. It was built in 1850 and is 152 feet 11 inches (46.61 m) in length. The bridge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Forksville bridge is obviously named for the borough it is in, which in turn is named for its location at the confluence or “forks” of the Little Loyalsock and Loyalsock Creeks. The Forksville bridge is a Burr arch truss type, with a load-bearing arch sandwiching multiple vertical king posts, for strength and rigidity. The building of the Forksville bridge was supervised by the 18-year-old Sadler Rogers, who used his hand-carved model of the structure. It served as the site of a stream gauge from 1908 to 1913 and is still an official Pennsylvania state highway bridge. The bridge was restored in 1970 and 2004 and is still in use.
Also in Sullivan County is the Hillsgrove Covered Bridge, a Burr arch truss covered bridge over Loyalsock Creek in Hillsgrove Township. It was built circa 1850 and is 186 feet (56.7 m) long. In 1973, it became the first covered bridge in the county to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The bridge is named for the township and nearby village of Hillsgrove, and is also known as Rinkers Covered Bridge for an adjoining farm. It was built by Sadler Rodgers, who also constructed the nearby Forksville Covered Bridge in the same year, with a similar design. The bridge is the longest of three covered bridges remaining in Sullivan County, and served as a landing site for lumber rafts on the creek between 1870 and 1890. Restoration work was carried out in 1963, 1968, 2010, and again in 2012 after serious flood damage.
The mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) is the state flower of Pennsylvania. It is a species of flowering plant in the heath family Ericaceae and is native to the eastern United States. Its range stretches from southern Maine south to northern Florida, and west to Indiana and Louisiana. Mountain laurel is also the state flower of Connecticut. It inspired the name of the Laurel Highlands in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Mountain laurel is an evergreen shrub growing 3–9 m (9.8–29.5 ft) tall. The leaves are 3–12 cm long and 1–4 cm wide. The flowers are hexagonal, sometimes appearing to be pentagonal, ranging from light pink to white, and occur in clusters. It blooms in May and June. All parts of the plant are poisonous, and the roots are fibrous and matted.
Jenkins Arboretum in Chester County has several nice examples of the plant. Locally I have also seen some on Mt. Misery in Valley Forge National Historic Park. I spent some time at Jenkins recently taking film photos using shallow depth of field.
The Kuerner Farm, also known as Ring Farm, is located in Chadds Ford. It is notable for its association with artist Andrew Wyeth, who created about one-third of his work, more than 1,000 paintings and drawings, on subjects he found there during a span of seventy-seven years.
In 1926, Karl Kuerner and his wife Anna rented the farm, which they bought in 1940. Karl had been a sheepherder near the Black Forest in his native Germany, and had been a machine gunner in the German Army during World War I. Andrew Wyeth’s first painting of the farm was completed in 1932, when Wyeth was just fifteen years old. The farm was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2011.The property abuts the Brandywine Battlefield, another National Historic Landmark. The farm is open to public tours, operated by the Brandywine River Museum.
I had a previous opportunity to photograph a wide shot of the farm , but I was recently able to get on one of the public tours. The first stop on the tour was the farmhouse,
